How to figure out what Hard Drive to Purchase?

Question

The cables that connect to my Internal Hard Drive are 2 of them. One is with 5 holes and the other with 39 ... would that help select which Hard Drive to purchase?

These are the specs to my computer:

http://www.support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim5150/en/sm/specs1.htm#wp1052310

Answer 1

by the looks of the specs it looks like

eide hard drive

but to make sure take your old one out

and look at the back slots

if the slots are flat then its SATA like this pic the slots on the right:http://www.hardwarezone.com.au/img/data/...

if there is 2 rows of pins then its EIDE like this pic the slots on the left:http://www.cibo-grupa.hr/images/big_pict...

Answer 2

SATA is superior.  If you have it available on your motherboard, you should upgrade.  40 pins is IDE.  If you have a ribbon cable with two 40 pin plugs, it's IDE.  Power cables don't have five pins, they only have four.  I don't think anything has five pins.

Answer 3

The 5 hole one is for the power and should come from the power supply.

The 39 pin connector should run from your hard drive to the motherboard. Just to let you know its a 40 pin connector that your talking about.

That cable should be a IDE cable so as long as you get a hard drive that can use IDE you'll be fine. I suggest newegg.com ( I buy all my parts from there and never had a problem)  

Answer 4

Do you mean 2 cables attached to the same drive?  That's weird, unless one of them is the power connector.  EIDE (also commonly referred to as Parallel ATA or "PATA") is the older standard for hard drives made through 2007 or so with capacities usually of 500GB or less.  Thirty-nine holes on a cable is the standard arrangement for the data connector on EIDE drives ... one row of 20 pins and one row of 19 pins.  The power connector for those types of drives are so-called "molex" connectors with four holes in a row.  I don't know what kind of connector has five holes.

Reading the specs at the link you provided, though, I notice that your machine supports both EIDE-PATA and Serial ATA ("SATA").  So that would give you a choice.  Just make sure that if you go with SATA and don't already have a SATA data cable that the drive you purchase includes one.  Hopefully your power supply has an extra connector for SATA drives, but if not they make small adapters for old molex 4-pin connectors.  In case you're wondering, the main difference between SATA and PATA, other than connector sizes, is that SATA generally provides faster data access.

Also make sure your computer supports drives at the capacity you are thinking of purchasing.  Some older models can't read the full size of drives larger than 128 gigs and can only use them as if they were 128.  I would guess that your machine is new enough that it would fully support large drives without a problem since most machines that support SATA and PCI-Express are in the same time-frame for large drive support.

Hope that helps.

Answer 5

wtf